Fully agree with this. Most important part is - how little Phoenix intervenes with asset management - with some very little configuration you bring your own asset package manager. If you still want to stick to Webpack - no issues. If you want Parcel, Vite, Snowpack - there are just a couple of changes you make in the core application and you are done. This separation is really beautiful. Anyone from Rails world - Sprockets, Webpacker - how they are very intertwined with application development - would understand the pain.
All in all - well done Phoenix team.
cvkmohan
11
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
The most important feature of esbuild is to not move from under us. Subscribe to Phoenix issues tracker and the Phoenix tag in the forum, you will see folks struggle with phx.new from time to time. Maybe the node version is too old, maybe npm is too recent, maybe node-sass just stopped working. All I want is for phx.new to work 5 years from now and this direction gives us that. We want you to be able to run mix phx.new, then mix phx.server, and have that page functional, regardless if you have opted-in to LiveView or not.
After that, you can opt-in to any complexity you want. You can bring Redis, you can bring Webpack, you can bring RabbitMQ. But the initial bootstrap should always work and stand the test of time.
I would love to ship with no assets toolchain but that’s not practical. Even a barebone Phoenix app requires importing “phoenix_html.js” and we can’t just bundle it into the app because running “mix deps.update phoenix_html” should update both the Elixir code and JavaScript code. So a minimal bundler is required even without LiveView (and even more required with LiveView).
I seriously recommend everyone thinking that the current status quo is ok to spend some time on the support front lines. It will be immediately apparent it is not fine and that it generates an incredible amount of churn. 
51
cvkmohan
Agree with this @josevalim - The first thing I do after a mix phx_new is - delete the assets folder - and - copy my alternate assets folder which is configured with vite. But, even there what I liked the most about phoenix application structure is - except the change in config/dev.exs - I do not have to make any other change. Quite refreshing coming from …
2
kokolegorille
cvkmohan
Unfortunately, that does not work. With --no-webpack, you can not install LiveView. If we go that route - configuring LiveView has to be done manually. Hence my shortcut.
2
kokolegorille
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
Correct. We will depend on Phoenix LiveView by default (we kinda already do due to the dashboard) and we will move to the more expressive .heex templates with function components. But, when it comes to your own code, you can still choose between phx.gen.html (no liveview) and phx.gen.live.
11
tozz
I wouldn’t count myself to the ones thinking the status quo is fine, I even said I think Phoenix should come without asset management (I get the problem of staleness though).
Hopefully this will lead to less churn, I just think it will be a different kind of churn, but I’m happy to be wrong.
2
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
Sorry if the tone came as accusative. I was not talking about you specifically, just as a general remark. 
Right, we may still have churn. But we are trading three churns (node, npm, and webpack) by one that we can explicitly hardcode and control on new app installs. On paper, this should be more manageable!
5
tozz
Sorry if the tone came as accusative. I was not talking about you specifically, just as a general remark.
No worries, I should’ve read it as general comment and not personal, the quote tricked me
Right, we may still have churn. But we are trading three churns (node, npm, and webpack) by one that we can explicitly hardcode and control on new app installs. On paper, this should be more manageable!
Lets hope for that! As someone who deals with this day to day I don’t wish it upon anyone, especially not when you’re all doing this free of charge
I think this will also make it easier to cement where Phoenix asset management starts and stops, since Node and NPM is out there’s no feasibility to adding frameworks like Tailwind to the defaults (and I say this as someone who loves Tailwind).
2